It took me a long time to finally decide on a math curriculum for Princess Perfect. The boys are doing Singapore Math but I wanted something fun and hands on and a bit less worksheet driven.
There aren't too many choices out there for math, and I pretty much have most!! Curriculum junkie that I am. I did try Math u see with her at the beginning of the year but it didn't work for her at all. She started pre-primary in main stream schooling at the beginning of the year with a pretty high level of math ability but I have to say sitting in a class doing not a stitch of math for two terms has taken its toll! She still has it there but it hasn't been exercised unfortunately.
I lay in bed with her a minute ago and she was chatting away merrily about a lesson we had done in Right start math today and I am so happy that we have chosen Right Start as it really is such a good fit for her and I cant sing its praises enough.
This is the box of manipulatives it arrives with which are amazing!! Even the boys want to use them! The math card games book is phenomenal and ranges from basic to advanced games. We have started at level A even though the placement test pegged her at level B purely because it is a different way of teaching to what she is used to, and what I am used to as well! A few differences are the use of an abacus for counting. They discourage counting on fingers completely and expect the child to recognise numbers and blocks of numbers on sight instead of counting. Also they don't say eleven or 21 etc They say one ten one for eleven and two ten one for 21, etc. It is to simplify the decimal placement for the child and, whilst I thought it would be hard for her to grasp, since she has been taught differently, it hasn't! She will hold up the abacus and say this is nine ten two and also 92. :-) Level A starts out slowly introducing the basics but by the end of level A you are at an Australian year 2 level at least! It covers concepts such as time, money, geometry, fractions, etc and this is just level A! It does do it in such a gentle, playful way that it is hard not to grasp it and there are probably only 20 worksheets in total for the whole level as the assessments are all practical based. The programme is 132 lessons so should take you around a year to complete if you do a lesson a day. For the first 40-50 lessons we have been doing 2 a day as they are pretty basic. I hope to finish level A by the end of the year and move onto level B next year.
Princess Perfect demonstrating a few ways to show 9+9=18
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